May 2, 2025
disarm humanity: meditations from the third decade of the third millennium
Part manifesto, part scholarship, part extended poetic engagement, Umniya Najaer makes a radical bid for a better future in a singularly peerless transdisciplinary work. Desktop viewing is recommended to preserve the original formatting of the work; a PDF version of this essay is available here for non-desktop users. Published as part of Mizna 25.2: Futurities, link to order here.
—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor
IF THERE IS AN UPPER LIMIT TO THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO COMPUTE MASS ATROCITY THEN THERE MUST BE A HARD LIMIT ON LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES BECAUSE THE IMPLICATION IS THAT AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES IT ALSO BECOMES INCREASINGLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE. THEREFORE, TO PROTECT THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE, WE MUST DISARM HUMANITY.
—Umniya Najaer
disarm humanity: meditations from the third decade of the third millennium
Dedicated to Aseel Hashim Hamdan
& all the children on earth
& in the infinite beyond1
So many have died for us to
live at the beginning of the end.
—Hiba Elgizouli.
You were created out of love
so carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.2
—Heba Abu Nada.
// heaven is crowded with children //
in the playground of the hereafter // they arrive tattered
& sprout new limbs // & practice cartwheels
across this chapter of human history
they flip the page // & we // the living // awaken
into a world with no blood on our hands
in the new world
no shackles // no hungry children
no limbs locked beneath rubble // no rubble
no human spirits tracing the depth of the sea
no drowned search for new country
no hungry child // on the side of the street
or in the belly of the mine // chipping away
the earth’s precious stones
in the new world
children bejewel the glistening earth
& every living being
already speaks the same cellular language
life seeks life seeks life seeks life
The year is 2025. On planet earth there are today 8.1 billion human beings. Two billion are children under the age of 14. More than 473 million, or more than 1 out of every 6 children, live in a conflict zone.
We have crossed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries.3 We share this breathing planet with approximately 8 million species of animals. Together we are living in the most sophisticated and technologically advanced system of global domination to ever exist. Although wolves, lions, spotted hyenas, and bottlenose dolphins are known to kill their own kind, humans are the only species known to exterminate our own children en masse.4
In the third decade of the third millennium, the human-made world reflects the dominant consciousness of our times: accumulation-through-annihilation and power-as-deathmaking. There are on earth today an estimated 12,100 nuclear warheads—enough to destroy the world many times over—and 1 billion firearms, 85% of which are in the hands of civilians. There are 120 million people displaced by violence, hunger, and environmental catastrophe and 43 million refugees. By one metric, 281 million human beings face acute food insecurity. By another metric, it is closer to 800 million, about a tenth of our species. The words hungry, malnourished, starving, and emaciated fail to capture the experience of constant hunger, searching, worry, exhaustion, headaches, of being unable to sleep due to the abdominal pains of famish or due to comforting a child who is crying from and into the emptiness.
Of those starving people, more than a million are inside Gaza, where an alliance between global powers brutally exterminated between 45,000 to 300,000 people in just fifteen months.5 Engineered their starvation. Wounded and maimed 100,000 human beings. Eclipsed tens of thousands by the debris of cities turned to deathscapes.
In Gaza, a toddler is pulled
from the rubble, crying:
am I alive?
am I still alive?
he is wide-eyed
trembling &
soaked in blood.
* * *
a boy, about four years old
plays at the ocean’s frothing lip
his two feet amputated
to nubs at the ankle
both arms amputated
above the elbows
the waves wash over him
he caresses the sand
he is teaching himself
to walk, to kick into the waves
a yellow ball
to glimmer like a galaxy
twinkling at
the horizon’s edge
Must we lose our own limbs to understand the disarray of a global system built on endless cycles of destruction? Must our own neighborhoods come under siege? Must we burn to death? Must all the birds change their migratory patterns to feast on corpses before the hairs on our necks stand up in protest?6 Must the dogs eat us? Must our own children be crushed beneath the rubble of pulverized cities before we recognize that our collective humanity and futurity is on the line?
In the third decade of the third millennium, in the wake of harrowing crimes against humanity, at this juncture in history when life in the present is denied to hundreds of thousands, how can we orient toward the future?7 How can we cultivate attunement to the totality of this world while resisting hegemonic narratives of normalized brutality? How can we exit the repeating cycle of bloodshed, annihilation, and atrocity in order to build a world in which every life, and every child, is protected?
The year is 2025. Of those starving, 25.6 million are inside Sudan.8 There, in the bid for regional domination, an alliance between global powers conspired to corrupt the aims of the people’s popular revolution. To this end, they have extinguished 150,000 lives and counting9 and have forcibly displaced 12.4 million—130,000 of whom are growing new life in their wombs. The dead are too many to count.10
the ones I knew personally
the little ones I held in my lap
the aunties I kissed on the cheek
are just a tiny fraction of the whole
Igbaal waited in a line for bread for two days before succumbing to heatstroke and dehydration. Aseel perished in the grips of a curable infection, unable to reach the decimated medical center. A car full of relatives, en route to my cousin—nine months pregnant with her first child—were executed by the militia in broad daylight. The ones I knew personally are tiny drops in humanity’s hemoglobin sea.
The quality and value of life is incongruent with numbers. A number is essentially an abstraction processed in the occipito-temporal and parietal cortex. When grief’s vulture shuts her eye, in the dead of world’s night, there is clarity: to the elite class of war criminals and politicians, our countries are a strategic territory to be riddled with conflict. Emptied of life, it will be easier to occupy, to excavate resources, to construct military and naval bases, to feign diplomatic relations between war criminals who call annihilation by various names: “diplomatic relations,” “globalization,” “security measures.” In this neoimperialist ploy, the slow and sudden deaths of our loved ones are a small price for suppressing self-determination by scattering the millions who dared to pursue the dream of a civilian-led democracy, a nation free of military rule.11 To the most elite class of tyrants, the scenes of our loved one’s annihilations are proxies anchoring their vision of a future in which those with the deadliest weapons and the lowest threshold for committing crimes against humanity will steer humanity’s forsaken, fettered ship.
In Gaza, in Sudan, in all the centers of militarized obliteration, the drone’s demonic hum pummels dawn. Each dawn arrives after an impossible night. Month after the month, the school is a blister, the mosque is a crater, the church is ash, the ash is patient, the patient is fully awake, and I begin to wonder: is there a limit to our comprehension of mass atrocity? Is there a threshold to the annihilation of life, after which even the tyrants and warmongers will tremble with the epiphany that our greatest need is the need for each other? And if, as I suspect, there is no threshold to annihilation—if the only line is the line we draw, if our ability to draw this line makes us human—then what is holding us back?
What will it take for human beings to organize the world in accordance to our highest potential as a species? What will it take to live upon the earth as if all beings have an equal and unequivocal right to life and the world’s abundance? What will it take to share resources equitably between all 8.1 billion or more of us? To repair what has been decimated? To lay down every last weapon and negotiate outside the language of annihilation? After annihilation, after brute power has run its course, once we exit the blood epoch, what language will we speak? How will we express power? Will there be a desire for othering? Are there limits to human consciousness? To collective learning? To our ability to fathom our twenty-first century reality? To our capacity for empathy?
Manifesting a solution to violence of epic proportions, to the fact that never again has become again and again and again, obliges us to contend with the scale of the whole. To reclaim our autonomy, let us face the whole world, each irreducible life, the entire human species. All of history. The sea of trepidation and possibility swirling in each of us: the living, the deceased and the unborn, the borderless unknowns.
How do we do this?
The year is 2025 and information travels almost as fast as light.12 This is the age of genocide livestreamed by the besieged. The age of gloating torturers. Of soldiers who sign their children’s names on missiles sent to annihilate more precious children. To scatter and shred the children so they are uncountable and difficult to recognize. In this neoliberal hour of imperial domination it is possible to watch a barefoot Congolese child mine coltan in the rain from within the screen of a highly advanced artifact manufactured in part by the labor of that child’s enslavement.13 It is possible in the same minute to watch a video of seven-year-old Sila Husu, who was sheltering in the Khadija school when an airstrike fractured her skull. In the video, Sila says, “my wish is to be like a doll, to be the most beautiful princess, and to travel outside for treatment. I want to live like all the children of the world who are happy.” Sila runs her hand along the staples in her head, over her right eyelid, blanketing a detached retina.14 In the age of livestreamed genocide, complicity runs much deeper than ignorance.
HOW ARE WE STILL JUST WATCHING WHEN THE CIRCULATING IMAGES AND CRIES OF MILLIONS MERIT A GLOBAL STATE OF EMERGENCY?
One day I come across several experiments in the field of human cognition and psychology that suggest humans struggle to comprehend mass atrocity.15 There are all sorts of terms to describe this phenomenon. Psychological numbing is the desensitization to large scale suffering. Scope insensitivity is a cognitive bias, a failure of humans to adjust our emotional response to mass atrocities. With diminishing marginal sensitivity, each additional death is perceived as less and less significant. Some cognitive scientists go so far as to speculate that perhaps we experience cognitive overload because human brains evolved in the context of small-scale social formations. I don’t want to endorse the perspective that humans struggle to comprehend mass atrocity, and, under different circumstances, I would think it an excuse for complicity, but, in observing the callous indifference of some of us, I wonder if perhaps this proposition can also be an invitation to move with renewed creativity and vigor against the interior and exterior forces that sustain brutality by limiting the capacity of some to perceive the present scale of obliteration empathetically.
If our bodies, our literal lives are sewn into the fabric of a sophisticated system of global domination that feasts on life, and if some of us are not processing the excruciating scale of annihilation taking place on earth, how would this require us to orient differently to the tasks of peace and worldbuilding?16
IF THERE IS AN UPPER LIMIT TO THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO APPREHEND MASS ATROCITY, THEN THERE MUST BE A HARD LIMIT ON LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES, BECAUSE THE IMPLICATION IS THAT AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES IT ALSO BECOMES INCREASINGLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE.
THEREFORE, TO PROTECT THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE, WE MUST DISARM HUMANITY.
The first quarter of the third millennium is marked by radical intensification of the methods of warfare, including the use of sophisticated autonomous weapons against civilians. Today’s “unprecedented” scale of violence against people and the planet is precedented by a surplus of weapons stockpiled by the murderous global elite of mega-empires whose goal is not to manage the affairs of their own nations but to expand the sphere of their authority over more human beings and territories.17 As long as we allow military leaders and autocratic politicians backed by militaries to rule the world, there will be no peace on earth. A sophisticated flow of lethal technologies keeps the most powerful politicians and their armies in power by foreclosing the possibility of nonmilitarized politics. The excess of militarized conflict is orchestrated by multibillion dollar weapons manufacturing industries that work hand-in-hand with “liberal” and “democratic” superpowers to set a highly antagonistic tone for global relations. This lethal mode of checkmate relationality puts all of us and our future descendants at risk of experiencing violence, war, or annihilation. Every shipment of military equipment, every bomb dropped on civilians, every country invaded, every incinerated hospital, ambulance, and school brings us incrementally closer to the possibility of insurmountable loss.
The year is 2025 and we are at a point of inflection.18 Each dawn bears witness to more bloodshed. Uranium-tinged earth. Families cremated instantaneously. International organizations are unable to maintain peace, security, or human rights. War criminals roam with impunity, each one lending the other a hand or a veto. There is no order. No checks. No balances. Tyrants transform cities into mountainous deathscapes, starve children, target civilians, demolish archeological sites, and disrupt ecological processes. What took millennia to flourish incinerates upon contact.
AT A MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC LEVEL, THE EMPIRE INTENDS FOR VIOLENCE TO BE AN INSTRUMENT OF COGNITIVE RECONDITIONING: TO BEND THE ARC OF HUMANITY FURTHER TOWARD FATALITY, DESPERATION, AND MORAL DEPRAVITY.
THE NORMALIZATION OF BARBARITY REINFORCES THE FAÇADE THAT ALL OF HISTORY IS A SET OF REPEATING STORIES AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO IMAGINE.
As we witness internationally orchestrated atrocities in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, let it be with the understanding that every war, every genocide, all militarized violence, and all crimes against humanity double as symbolic gestures to normalize epistemic brutality, to disintegrate human autonomy, and to numb our imaginations.19 The empires of death aim to expunge the plurality of human history from collective memory, bloodwashing history so that this profusely violent present can stand in contrast to no other.
It is up to us to preserve the creativity, diversity, and humanity of our species’ past, present, and future with the understanding that the destruction of unquantifiable human life and civilization is just the outward facing function of militarized violence. The greater objective is to entrench the myth that malevolence, warfare, murder, annihilation, and alienation are natural extensions of the human condition. The propaganda that our diverse beliefs and origins obstruct harmonious coexistence sustains “wars without end” as a coverup for the centuries-old progression of imperial control, resource extraction, and life-siphoning cycles. The legitimacy of the current world order as a political sphere comprised of territorial militarized nation-states depends on the mass delusion that the human world is violent beyond repair and that it is therefore reasonable for empires to conduct the world through war, antagonism, annihilation, and bloodshed.
Peaceful negotiations, ceasefires, and arms embargoes threaten this narrative. Civilized relations between nations of equal diplomatic status jeopardize the skewed hierarchy of imperial supremacy. It is precisely because violence cannot deteriorate the core of our collective humanity that foreclosing the possibility of humane politics and civilized nonviolent conflict resolution requires a constant production of brutality and dehumanization. The empire strains to fabricate unequal power relations between nations, seizing power and territory through brute violence—but this does not amount to legitimacy. Since legitimacy cannot be taken by force, the empire deploys force to shape consciousness, to manipulate our ideas of what is possible and what is acceptable. Empires manufacture horrific deathscapes and wage endless wars in an effort to standardize their own impunity. Their allies get the benefit of the same legitimacy and impunity extended to them. Therefore every war criminal has among his allies a cohort of war criminals who masquerade as political leaders.
And yet, empires, like their figureheads, are temporary formations. For every war criminal there are millions of us who reject the propaganda that the way things are is how they will always be. For each person desensitized by the conspiracy of brutality, there are a hundred more invested in building a harmonious future that diverges from the gladiatorial present. Together, we dream and manifest a world unencumbered by bloodshed.
DECADES AND CENTURIES OF SURVIVING ORGANIZED DEHUMANIZATION TAUGHT US THAT FREEDOM DREAMS ARE STRONGER THAN DEATH MACHINES.
OUR COLLECTIVE HUMANITY, LOVE, EMPATHY, AND INGENUITY THREATEN TO UNRAVEL THE NARRATIVE OF NORMALIZED BRUTALITY, THE SEAT OF MODERN POWER AND EVIL, FROM ITS CORE.
While empires and military governments deploy brutality to shape human consciousness, to manufacture complicity, and to render democratic processes futile, the truth is that violence does not inevitably beget more violence. Even under the most extreme forms of degradation, the besieged in Gaza are planting tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, knitting sweaters, and baking sweets to hand out to the children who invent songs, write poems, raise kittens, and carry their siblings all while pleading with the world to draw a line in the sand. Faced with the collapse of the state, Sudanese people are organizing grassroots “emergency response rooms” in the form of community kitchens, youth education centers, puppet shows for displaced children, surgeries performed in underground shipping containers, and critical psychological services for victims of militarized sexual violence. Whenever and wherever our governments, institutions, and civil liberties may come under attack, let the power of these mutual aid networks serve as a potent reminder that dignified life is made possible by the cumulative actions of those who step up and take care of their communities. However brutal the present may be, it does not foreclose the possibility of more humane futures. Brutality does not necessarily fortify the agenda of cruelty. Impunity cannot extinguish the seed of humanity. This means that we have a choice to live, act, and intervene with the certainty that despite extraordinary displays of violence, the future of our species will not be determined by the savage politics of militarized empires.
While experiencing or witnessing dehumanization and annihilation can engender numbness, despair, and imaginative foreclosure, it can also revitalize our investment in humanity. Black Studies scholar Nicholas Brady wrote, “paradoxically, the most hopeful people are those who have no hope in the system.”20 The Lebanese anthropologist Munira Khayat put it like this: “When you’re looking at it from the perspective of the empire, the war machine appears totalizing. But when you’re in the crosshairs of the death machine, you always have hope, because you’re living it.”21 It is historical moments like ours, when brute power is at its apex, when, in the delirium of impunity, empires neglect to cover their bloody tracks, that a hopeless-hopeful alchemy takes root. All the veils fall away, the fragility of life is palpable, the criminality of our political leaders is apparent, the stakes of disarmament and peacebuilding are stark, and dehumanization, the seed of our collective suffering, becomes the source of a shared clairvoyance.
TO BREAK THE REPEATING CYCLE OF BRUTALITY WE MUST ORGANIZE THE WORLD AROUND THE SANCTITY OF LIFE.
The year is 2025. From inside the bloodiest center of empire, no task is as urgent as averting the acceleration of warfare. This is the year to declare every life worthy of life. Together, we, the living, must draw the line and usher in an era of human history in which power and defense are based in the sanctity of life, rather than the ease of ending life. For this to become possible, we will need to unilaterally disarm our species, defund our militaries, and demilitarize our borders. Otherwise, we may all, sooner or later, find ourselves or our loved ones in the crosshairs of a death-machine. Beginning with a rejection of narratives of normalized domination, the unilateral disarmament of the human species hinges on the collective’s ability to unequivocally value all life. Therefore, the call to disarm our species implores a metamorphosis in human consciousness and relationships.
If disarming humanity seems absurd, let us begin by naming and imagining it. Let us imagine a world without Aviation Thermobaric Bombs. Without GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs. Without Lockheed AC-130 gunships. Without AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopters.22 Without quadcopter drones which increase targeted attacks and lower the threshold for the use of force while crying out in the voices of vulnerable newborns and injured women. Let us imagine all children living without the threat of FGM-148 Javelin antitank missiles, which the RSF militia in Sudan uses against human beings. Imagine succumbing to a weapon made to destroy a tank or an aircraft. But more urgently, imagine a world without F-22 Raptor fighter jets or the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon Systems or the MK-84 general-purpose bomb or Hellfire AGM-114 missiles or landmines or nuclear weapons.23
If we must begin somewhere, let us begin with the consensus that, in a global system built on perpetuating endless cycles of death and deprivation, nothing is more important than protecting all life unequivocally. The sanctity of life is the center of gravity around which everything and everyone must orient, each in our own way, orbiting life, traversing time, harmonizing our expressions. To exit the cycle of bloodshed, we cannot allow a single life to be taken in the bid for power or in the name of “defense.”24 Let us vigorously contest normalized brutalities, especially murder, no matter the pretense.
Our species will enter a new era of human history when we collectively and consciously ban the production, stockpiling, trade, and use of militarized weapons by all state and nonstate entities.
Now, amid escalating violence, it is imperative to advocate for what has been deemed impossible:
a world without massacre.
a future without weapons.
land rematriation.
reconciliation.
world peace.
* * *
WHAT IS THE MEASURE BETWEEN THE WORLD AS IT IS & THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE, IF WE DECLARE THE PRESENT THE LINE?
As conflict and militarization escalate, amid increasing impunity, rising geopolitical instability, and an arms race for AI-powered autonomous weapons, I urge the people of the world to reclaim the possibility of peace. To pursue peace beyond its connotation as a pacifying conceptual tool of neoliberal murderous empires. To reclaim peacebuilding from international governing bodies whose efforts are rendered futile by the simple use of a veto. The evolution in consciousness that will enable us to exit the cycle of violence is also an evolution in our collective values, language, and praxis of peace, armistice, nonviolence, reconciliation, and harm reduction. If inner peace is a seed, then planetary peace is the forests; for these forests to flourish, we must protect and nourish the seeds and fruit of peace across time and space, among the newborns and the elderly, among the soldiers and the wounded, and especially in the bloody cores of empire. To exit the cycle of bloodshed, let us sow peace in ourselves, nurture peace in our children, practice peace in our classrooms, cultivate peace in our communities, disseminate peace in our media, and model peace in the relations between our nations.
The year is 2025. We are alive at a critical point in the history of our species and our planet. Our actions and inactions carry profound impacts beyond our own lives. While the long-term aspiration is a future without weapons, a world where all life is protected, we are today alive in the meantime—in the breach between the epoch of bloodshed and the world as it could be. In this meantime let us do everything in our power to protect those who may not make it to the future if we do not act immediately and decisively to deliver arms embargoes, humanitarian relief, and life-saving medical support. If the cost of our inaction is death, injury, and the degradation of our human kin, then let us not wait on the bureaucracy of transnational governing bodies. Let us resist militarization and tyranny everywhere. Let us provide direct financial aid to the vulnerable, prevent the deployment of weapons, deliver medical care to the wounded, care for the children traumatized by war, grief, and starvation; let us advocate for besieged journalists and boycott the war machine, regardless of who is in its crosshairs—we all belong to life. In this meantime between carnage and cohesion, let us shatter the deception of normalcy, let us speak openly and piercingly about human rights violations, about our complicity in them, about the need to hold war criminals accountable. In the breach between injury and vitality, let us speak the names of those brutally torn from this earth, let us amplify the messages of the besieged, let us say never again and let “never” mean not even today, not tomorrow, not anyone, anywhere, ever, not even the sharks. Let us take every action we can toward protecting life and pursuing peace on earth. Let us stop at nothing until we stop the world in its tracks. Let us stop the world long enough to sojourn the missiles, to honor all we have lost, to cleanse the blood from the earth, to dare to dream to start anew, orbiting love.
* * *
THE FUTURE IS AN OPEN INTERVAL, UNREQUITED BY THE PRESENT.
to exit modernity’s matrix
we witness-dream with open eyes
* * *
in my dream a boat sails toward Gaza
& reaches the shore unharmed
a universal ceasefire holds grief’s
ceaseless memory, softly
we reroute
the trajectory of our species
the world is becoming conscious of itself
through our most audacious freedom dreams
& the bravest among us are not even yet alive
* * *
imagine
we are points
along the continuum of life
& this is not our final form
we are the threshold
bridging timelines
the world as it is
cries out for
the world as it could be
with the memory
of a toothless child, her rapid moods
and clumsy feet, her panicked cries
as the interior landscape
catches fire, modernity glitches
knowing we cannot go on like this
smoldering, we jump the line
& we are every child
& the ceasefire is eternal
* * *
imagine
a mass exodus
from the blood epoch
we enter a new era in the human record
humanity disarms itself
soldiers neutralize every weapon
before burying their uniforms
a tender root system
germinates
from the formerly drenched earth
our species awakens trembling
with love
* * *
fragile
plural
human
insist
every life is worth living
to preserve life
to manifest a new relation to
life–&–death–&–the–world
abandon modernity’s deathtrap
pursue harmonious coexistence with all living beings
redistribute resources
protect life
provision nature to heal itself
manifest from the inside-out a metamorphosis
in the collective awareness of our species
* * *
THE ROOT OF ALL DEHUMANIZATION IS THE ACCEPTABILITY OF HARM BASED IN THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION.
THE SEED OF HUMANIZATION IS A PRAXIS OF CARE BASED IN THE IRREDUCIBLE INTERCONNECTION OF ALL LIFE.
THEREFORE, LET US TRANSFORM THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR SPECIES, UNIT BY UNIT, FROM THE INSIDE OUT.
The extraordinary brutalities, the genocides and ecocides of our present are ruptures in the fabric of the modern world. We are living at ground zero and every break is an opening for a metamorphosis in human consciousness.
Ground zero is defined as:
1) the point directly below, above, or at which a nuclear explosion occurs
2) the center or origin of rapid, intense, or violent activity or change
3) a starting point, the very beginning
The year is 2025. The world is ablaze. At ground zero, the earth glistens with human blood. The wind is a cradle for families dismembered in cataclysmic explosions. The sky sheds tears over spirits wandering among the debris of shattered cities. In the third decade of the third millennium, the lives of 8.1 billion human beings are shaped by the worldviews of an elite global minority who rely on millions to remain passive in the face of endless cycles of senseless murder, brutality, looting, and destruction. Passivity relies on an imagined partition, a phantom bifurcation, a rupture between the bystander who observes brutality and the person or population subjected to atrocity.
The artifice of separation is central to reproducing the internal justifying logics of othering, exclusion, exploitation, extermination, enslavement, and annihilation. Our twenty-first century system of global domination is fueled by various shifting illusions of individuality, which we may experience in an embodied sense as separation, isolation, aversion toward the “other,” or estrangement from oneself and the world. The first danger in all this is that it is possible to experience the illusion of separation as reality. The second danger is that the interplay between illusion and reality can breed pessimism and imaginative foreclosure as many are no longer able to envision a way out of this mess. At times, it is difficult to conceive that the collaborative future which is now deemed impossible will one day have seemed inevitable. This is the paradox of dehumanization and it is the reason we cannot begin the process of disarming humanity in boardrooms.
To disarm humanity, we must first transform the consciousness of our species. To resist the hegemonic illusion of normalized brutality, let us begin to cultivate species double consciousness: an empathic attunement to the reality of the world as it is now alongside a speculative and experimental knowledge of the world as it could be if we prioritized the wellbeing of all life. Looking with this double sight at the rift between the two worlds, the space between them is not hollow. From the rift between the world as it is and the world as it could be emerges the ancient, flickering force of human autonomy. One by one, the spark catches in the interior landscape of millions, an ancient and timeless momentum awakens, rousing us to action. To “unmake then consciously now remake the world,”25 we must shed our old skin as mere participants in another man’s system and emerge as autonomous worldbuilders mutually shaping the present and future trajectory of our species based on the principle of life. Life is inherently free. Unfreedom is fabricated and ephemeral.
Cultivating transpersonal empathic consciousness to the collective reality of life on earth begins with a choice to decenter the singular experience of being in order to perceive the world through the stimuli and perspectives of those whose suffering has the capacity to renew the contract between all human beings—and between humans and all living beings.26 To be humanized by our species’ brutality, we must be fully attuned to witness the entirety of our present world transpersonally. In his Treatise on the Whole-World, the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant offers the following reflections:
“We do not always see, and usually we try not to see, the destitution of the world, in the forests of Rwanda and the streets of New York, in the underground workshops of Asia where the children do not grow up and in the silent heights of the Andes, and in all the places of debasement, degradation, and prostitution, and so many others that flash before our wide open eyes, but we cannot fail to admit that all this is making a noise, an unstoppable murmuring that we, without realizing it, mix into the mechanical, humdrum little tunes of our progress and our driftings.
Each one of us has his own reasons to listen to this cry, and these different approaches serve to change this sound of the world that we all, at the same time, hear where we are.”27
Glissant depicts a polysensory empathic mechanism of echolocation and metaphysical transmutation. To “hear where we are,” to position ourselves in relation to the whole, and to perceive the collective condition of humanity within the longer arc of our species’ existence, we must become profoundly attuned to one another’s lived realities. To witness the entirety of the world does not require that we directly hear or see; we can be attuned to what happens behind closed doors—in the boardrooms of the billionaire political elite, in military torture chambers, in sweatshops, in the underground mines, amid the media blackout, in the deathscapes beneath the rubble—without hearing or seeing any of it. Glissant suggests that transpersonal attunement is a catalyst for metaphysical transformation. By tuning in to the whole world, we begin to transform it, similar to the way that the observation of quantum occurrences alters the phenomena’s behavior. Transpersonal empathic attunement begins with the aspiration to give up the comfort of anesthetized existence and the illusion of separation in order to absorb with our own body, mind, and spirit the totality of what is taking place on our living, breathing home.
Let us listen to the 117 million refugees, in tents, in immigration detention centers, where children are ripped from their parents rarely to be reunited again, in the metropolises straddling borders, searching for dignity in a country that is a stranger, crossing deserts, thirsty, hungry, cold. Let us feel the desperation of the women and girls raped and gang raped by soldiers. Let us be transmuted by the ricochet of exhaustion in slaughterhouses, in the textile factories, of the children crawling and coughing inside mines, digging for precious metals, hoping to afford a meal. Let our metamorphosis center the 50 million human beings trapped in modern-day slavery whose freedom necessitates a reformulation of the global order. Let us tune in to the discordant clatter of the saw mills plucking the Amazon bare and the melancholic quiet after the burn, when even the insects and macaws have turned to ash. Wherever we may be, let us hear the gentle whimpers of the panther whose paws are raw blisters.28 The child who is fully awake during amputation. Inhale and hear the exhale of the polar bear who must swim for days on end because there is no ground to walk on.29 Exhale and feel the sharp pains in the limbs of the infant in the long hours before cold stops her tiny heart. Share the heartbreak of the parents who cry into white bundles of gauze.30
When we feel what each other feels, the transformative force of brutality permeates from the epicenter of the singular human experience outward into the collective, expanding the field of awareness, interweaving the syncopated lives and dreams and sufferings of 8 billion rare beings into a web of empathic awareness. To disarm our species and rehabilitate our planet, we must be willing to take into ourselves the abrasive timbre of it all and allow the fragility of all living beings to catalyze us into action, to initiate a praxis of empathic care, and unleash a landslide of solidarity with those deemed unworthy of life.
TRANSPERSONAL ATTUNEMENT TO COLLECTIVE SUFFERING AND EMPATHIC CARE FOR ALL LIFE TRANSMUTES MODERNITY’S ILLUSION OF SEPARATION, DECOMPOSING THE FOUNDATION OF ALL DEHUMANIZATION INTO THE FERTILE SOIL OF A NEW WORLD ORDER.
Awareness of the interconnectedness of all living beings and cognizance of the inherent value of all life are incompatible with the modern agenda of death. Scaled to the measure of the human species, transpersonal empathic consciousness has the potential to relegate the modern neoliberal necropolitical milieu to relics of a bloody human past. And yet, in the midst of genocides and neoimperial wars without end, it is not enough to be attuned to the reality of the world. We must act. Transpersonal and interspecies empathic consciousness are stepping stones for perceiving a gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. The praxis of species double consciousness is yet another stepping stone for action. Action transmutes consciousness into autonomy and vice versa. Therefore, let us witness and not give in to despair in order to assert with the force of our entire living beings the basic reality that another world is possible. Our actions are the condition of its possibility.
In this world of possibility, we who inherited the epoch of bloodshed collaborate to formulate conditions where all beings can thrive. We engineer a global network to distribute resources based on collective needs and ecological sustainability, rather than profit. We ensure all people have access to safe housing, nutritious food, and quality healthcare. Freed of the need to earn the right to live, all 8.1 billion of us have more time to spend with our loved ones, to study, to celebrate the diversity of our species and planet, to innovate, to rest, to imagine and manifest even better worlds. In a world made to the measure of empathic intelligence, health is a universal human right. Hospitals are healing temples for the body, mind and spirit. Once knowledge is disentangled from competition and profit, collective learning accelerates. In this new world, wealth cannot be concentrated by denying others their right to life. Without the highly disproportionate accumulation of wealth, it is not possible to corrupt politics. Leaders are chosen for their humility, ingenuity, and ability to maintain peace through disarmament, dialogue, and collaboration. Armies are replaced by interdisciplinary teams of volunteers who specialize in crisis management—they address natural disasters, pandemics, environmental emergencies, and trauma. Former military budgets are reallocated to fund sustainable architecture, public transportation, education, and open access research. Schools are sites of exploration for diverse forms of knowledge. Rote memorization is replaced with critical, creative, and collaborative learning, and everyone has lifelong access to education. Diversity and invention flourish, elevating the human experience. People gather at festivals to celebrate cultural and religious traditions, to dance, to sing, to eat, and to marvel at the beauty of our brief time as miracles on Earth. All people are free to move, live, and work wherever they choose, and protected wildlife corridors ensure safe migration for animals. We collaborate to prevent extinction, restoring endangered species and ecosystems through wildlife rehabilitation, reforestation, reindigenization, and ocean-cleaning projects. The generation who inherited a noxious world lays down their weapons to detoxify the land, water, and food systems, improving the quality of life for all living beings. With collective human ingenuity directed toward sustaining life, the unnecessary suffering that defined the blood epoch is overtaken by a sense of possibility rooted in our interconnected capacity to care for one another. Once we cease to live in a competitive hand-to-mouth death-cycle, it is not only our time that will be freed up, but our very life force, the seed of all autonomy.
Between the world as it is and the world as it could be are our actions and inactions. It must not be up to the most vulnerable among us to elevate the systematically decimated consciousness of our species. In the centers of empire let us insist that our “comforts” are not worth the decimation of life. Let us refuse to make house within the depravity of this killing machine.31
Building new worlds begins with our resolve to form new connections and cultivate sites of possibility that center the value of life.32
If there are no alternatives to modernity, then there is no possibility for us to consent to it. Generating alternatives to the hegemonic order is the basis of liberty and the condition of collective autonomy. By weaving new webs of relation and possibility, we begin to transmute our witness-dreams to action. We recover our human identity as active conscious agents shaping the present and future trajectory of our species and our planet.
Empathy is a historical force of unknown proportion which we can cultivate by “listening to the cry of the world.”33
I invite each of us, as Bob Marley implored, to hear the children crying with the conscious knowledge that this sound initiates a transformative, empathic, worldbending process. I invite us to declutter our inner eyes, unveiling the connection to the inner child. Inside each of us lives an inner child who connects us to all the children, all over the Earth. We are the children of the world and the guardians of the children who will inherit the world from us. To guard them, to usher in a new era of politics, to terminate all territorial battles, to end the bid for global domination, to begin the process of global disarmament, to ensure that the children will one day grow up, let us hear the children crying, let us begin to feel what each other feels, and let us act on our visions of the world as it could be. Let us teach the children that this is not our final form, therefore this human chapter, this epoch of carnage and bloodshed, is a historical stepping stone: The third millennium is the beginning of the end of brutality. The time to leap the line is now.
For all who have crossed over, protecting the future of our world, like every form of love put into action, requires courage, stamina, and creativity. Abolishing modernity’s interlinked death systems is not a prerequisite to building new worlds. It is the afterglow. Transpersonal attunement, species double consciousness, and witness-dreams transmuted to autonomous actions are worldbuilding and worldbending tools beyond the master’s toolbox.34
as life seeks life
on a blue jewel
let us be seeds
of peace’s forests
let us build a world
where children grow up
let us mold our lives
into tender cradles
for a future where we
carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.
1. I dedicate this essay to my cousin Aseel, a young girl, one of tens of thousands, who was plucked from life in the first year of the counterrevolutionary war in Sudan. I dedicate my witness-dreams to every child denied a fair chance to experience life on Earth unencumbered by the threat of brutality. ↩
2. This line is from the poem “Not Just Passing,” one of the last poems written by Heba Abu Nada before she was ripped from earth by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis on October 20, 2023. The poem, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine, is structured as a conversation between a star and the little light in the poet’s heart. On October 8, Heba wrote, “Gaza’s night is / dark apart from the glow of rockets, / quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, / terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, / black apart from the light of the martyrs. / Good night, Gaza.” Then on October 18, she wrote, “Each of us in Gaza is either witness to or martyr for liberation. Each is waiting to see which of the two they’ll become up there with God. We have already started building a new city in Heaven . . . In Heaven, the new Gaza is free of siege. It is taking shape now.” Like Heba, I imagine heaven as the liberated meeting ground of all the innocent besieged. I imagine the children of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, and Ukraine playing games amid glimmering starlight. ↩
3. Scientists at the Stockholm University Resilience Center quantified nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. They are 1) stratospheric ozone depletion, 2) atmospheric aerosol loading, 3) ocean acidification, 4) biogeochemical flows, 5) freshwater change, 6) land system change, 7) biosphere integrity, 8) climate change, and 9) novel entities. Novel entities are defined as “new substances, new forms of existing substances, and modified life forms,” including “chemicals and other new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system as well as naturally occurring elements (for example, heavy metals) mobilized by anthropogenic activities.” As of January 2025, planetary boundaries 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 have been crossed. ↩
4. In the thoroughly critiqued book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, the biological anthropologists Richard W. Wrangham and Dale Peterson compare the propensity for violence in chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans, arguing that while the capacity for aggression may be biologically rooted, the expression of violence in human societies is heavily influenced by cultural norms and institutions. The question of whether violence and territoriality are “natural” obscures the fact that, as the philosopher and social critic Sylvia Wynter argues, humans autoinstitute the social codes we use to govern ourselves. We are the creators of our cultures, beliefs, norms, and world orders. From this perspective, violence is cultural. The forms of brutality, dehumanization, and oppression that define the twenty-first century are learned behaviors which, over time, become culturally and historically engrained. In her book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, Barbara Coloroso demonstrates a continuum of dehumanization, from classification, to bullying, to extermination, and denial. The point is that humans are able to collectively guard against the possibility of mass atrocities by cultivating empathy, respect, and peaceful strategies for handling conflict. Our capacity to end the endless cycle of brutality and create in its stead a harmonious world hinges on resocialization in an ethic of empathy and the nonhierarchical value of life. ↩
5. In July, 2024, The Lancet published a report titled, “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential,” that states that, “applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” In December 2024, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah estimated the true death count to be around 300,000 or 10%–12% of Gaza’s population. This figure takes into account people whose bodies were “pulverized” by bombs, those who died of infectious diseases, starvation, hypothermia, and lack of access to medical care imposed by the siege. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that “more than one million of Gaza’s inhabitants face the most extreme form of malnutrition—classified by the IPC as ‘Catastrophe or Famine.’” ↩
6. According to witness accounts, vultures and other carnivorous birds have veered from their migratory paths, lured by the sheer mass of unburied corpses in Sudan. According to a Haaretz article, Israeli soldiers established an open killing zone known as the Netzarim Corridor. Any Palestinian who crosses this imaginary line separating the north and south of Gaza is considered a legitimate target. A commander in Division 252 told Haaretz, “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.” According to vast archeological research, humans have been burying our dead since the paleolithic period. In fact, the oldest human burial sites, dating 80,000–100,000 years old, are the Es-Skhul and Qafzeh caves, located in present day Nazareth, or al-Nasirah, a mere 93 miles north of the Netzarim Corridor. And yet, in the year 2025, human beings are exterminated en masse and denied the basic human dignity of having their corpses laid beneath the earth. The world watches carnivorous birds and canines feast on our kin while empires expand their military budgets and deploy autonomous weapons to annihilate civilian populations. ↩
7. According to the Hebrew calendar we are in the year 5785. According to the Chinese calendar we are in the year 4722. According to the Buddhist calendar we are in the year 2569. According to the Hindu (Shaka Samvat) calendar we are in the year 1,946. According to the Islamic calendar we are in the year 1446. And according to the Igbo calendar we are in the year 1025. Chronological accounting is relative, however, the current hegemonically accepted Gregorian calendar places us in the year 2025, where the year 1 AD represents the estimated birth year of Jesus Christ. This accounting of time takes as its starting point a story of occupation and forced displacement that continues in the present. In a recent speech, the Palestinian theologian and pastor, Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac reminded us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, under the Roman occupations of Augustus Caesar and Herod, the ruler of the occupied Roman province of Judea. According to the New Testament, Joseph and Mary were forced to leave Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem so that they could be counted in a census enforced by the Roman occupation. After their forced displacement and upon arriving in Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to baby Jesus. When Herod ordered the massacre of all male children under the age of two, Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus fled from Bethlehem to Egypt. Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac draws parallels between the past and the present, stating, “The Christmas story is actually a very Palestinian story. The circumstances of Palestine 2000 years ago were not very much different from the Palestinian circumstances today.” Located a mere 6 miles north of Bethlehem, the city of Jerusalem, one of the oldest centers of human civilization, has been captured and occupied 44 times, starting in the Bronze Age and continuing into the present. At the 2025th annual Gregorian mark, it is high time to end the repeating cycle of occupation and brutality. ↩
8. According to UNICEF, as of June 2024, of the 25.6 million facing “high levels of acute hunger” (IPC phase 3+), about 755,000 are experiencing the most catastrophic classification of food insecurity (IPC phase 5). According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), approximately 24.6 million people across Sudan will likely experience high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) between December 2024 and May 2025. This includes 8.1 million people in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency) and at least 638,000 people in IPC Phase 5 (Catastrophe). ↩
9. Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is the result of a counterrevolutionary proxy war which intends to scatter the millions who dared dream of a country free of military rule and a democracy run by civilians rather than military dictators. Given Sudan’s strategic location and plethora of natural resources, at least fifteen countries are directly and indirectly supporting the two armed groups wreaking havoc on the country. The genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are supported by the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Israel, and indirectly by the US, UK, and European Union. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have received support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Russia, although the latter switched its support to the RSF. The US cannot rein in the UAE’s role in perpetuating war, famine, ethnic cleansing, weapons trafficking, human trafficking—the humanitarian crises in Sudan—because it is heavily invested in normalizing Arab-Israeli relations and achieving the aims of the Abraham Accords. The RSF and the SAF are part of the same coercive military apparatus. Despite their rivalry, both armed groups, much like their funders, share a total disregard of international humanitarian law. ↩
10. In both Gaza and Sudan, there is no exact record of the deceased. In the case of Gaza, the United States banned the use of the Gaza Health Ministry’s death count, even as it has been corroborated by The Lancet and the World Health Organization. In Sudan, conservative estimates state that 16,800 people have been killed, but according to the US special envoy Tom Perriello, the death count is closer to 150,000 (as of June 2024). When there are too many dead to count, let alone to grieve one-by-one, that is a clear sign that the covenant of life has been breached. The year is 2025 and the balance of the life-and-death continuum is endangered. ↩
11. Note on the aims of the Sudanese Revolution: Starting in December 2018, millions of Sudanese people mobilized under a united call for civilian rule and a peaceful transition to a democratic government, with three branches of government. One of the slogans was العسكر للثكنات والجنجويد ينحل, which is a call for the military (the SAF) to return to their barracks and for the dissolution of the “Janjaweed” militia (the RSF). The Sudanese people’s revolution is opposed to military leadership and foreign interference in Sudanese politics by nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, who have historically stood against democracy in Sudan. The idea of a fully civilian-led government did not sit well with the UAE and Saudi Arabia since they depend on military leaders who can be bribed to do their dirty bidding. Moreover, the UAE and Saudi Arabia viewed democracy in Sudan as a threat to their own authoritarian monarchic systems and therefore conspired to form within Sudan a government ruled by the military with minimal civilian participation. They took it upon themselves to corrupt the transition to democratic rule by funding two sides of a brutal counterrevolutionary proxy war that has cost 150,000–200,000 human lives, displaced 13 million people, left 19 million children without access to education, and put 25 million people at risk of famine. ↩
12. Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, while digital communications travel at about 200,000 kilometers a second. The speed of human processing is about 10–20 bits per second, with a maximum of 60 bits. ↩
13. Minerals are the raw material of militarized power. The death machine depends on a constant supply of high-grade aluminum, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, ferrochromium, ferromanganese, lead, lithium, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, niobium, tantalum, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, zinc, and zirconium to manufacture various instruments of war, including nuclear weapons, missiles, helicopters, surveillance technologies, and AI-based autonomous weapons systems. Every quest of global or regional domination hinges on acquiring these minerals. Mines, therefore, are some of the least regulated and most degraded places on earth. ↩
14. Another day Sila says, “I want to be a doctor when I grow up, and I want to treat little children.” To what degree is this dream conditioned by the catastrophe of thousands of injured children in the context of a genocide that targets medical staff, doctors, surgeons, and hospitals including the neonatal wards? Untouched by violence, what would the children dream? ↩
15. Political analysis gives limited insight into the issue of human brutality. To understand not only the origins but the continued prevalence of violence requires a polydisciplinary approach to the study of our species. Studies in human psychology and cognition offer one of countless avenues to pursue insights into violence amongst humans. In his paper, “‘If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act’: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology specializing in studies of human judgment, decision making, and risk analysis poses the question: “Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?” He draws on research that suggests the affective responses that motivate human moral intuition and judgements—like empathy, sympathy, compassion, sadness, pity, and distress—diminish as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. Thus, as the loss of life increases, psychological numbing sets in, “diminishing sensitivity to the value of life.” Slovic concludes, “we cannot depend only upon our moral feelings to motivate us to take proper actions against genocide . . . It is time to reexamine this failure [of the genocide convention] in light of the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and other crimes against humanity.” In this essay I suggest that rather than abandoning the role of feeling in motivating transformation, we can work to transform the consciousness of our species by resensitizing ourselves to the inherent value of life. We can prevent mass atrocity by disarming humanity. ↩
16. In his 2003 article “Necropolitics” and the 2019 monograph of the same name, the Cameroonian philosopher and social theorist Achille Mbembe characterizes modern power as “necropolitical.” Necropower describes a mode of governance in which modern states deploy direct death, terror, and neglect in order to kill members of populations that are already systematically marked as subhuman or “enemies of the state” by legacies of racial hierarchy and colonial violence. ↩
17. The issue of whether the present scale of annihilation is precedented is subject to ongoing debates, generally privileging comparative logics. Contrasting one era, massacre, war, or genocide, against another neglects the constitutive nature of violent historical events and obscures the staggering scale of the whole. Considering all acts of organized brutality as interconnected points in the arc over our species’ history, reveals an alarming, trans-scalar pattern of escalation, spanning from the Iron Age to the modern period. Today, in the Anthropocene, brutality against human beings converges with brutality against the planet, threatening the wellbeing of the unanimous lifesystem. If nothing else, the planetary scale and impact of annihilation is unprecedented. ↩
18. In 2024, the world faced 56 international conflicts, with 92 nations involved in conflicts outside their borders. A United Nations report states that “the world is facing the highest number of violent conflicts since the Second World War and 2 billion people—a quarter of humanity—live in places affected by such conflict.” The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that in 2023, world military expenditure reached “an all-time high of $2,443 billion.” Meanwhile, the Global Peace Index 2024 report states that, “expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping totaled $49.6 billion, representing less than 0.6% of total military spending.” ↩
19. As the Jamaican social theorist Sylvia Wynter teaches, the malleability of human consciousness has been instrumentalized for millennia to uphold various epistemic orders and to consolidate and legitimize power. Writers including Noam Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Walter Rodney, and Sylvia Wynter have written about the ways that violence conditions consciousness. While some of these works focus on the effect of violence on oppressed peoples, it is in fact the Western liberal subject whose consciousness and worldview is most thoroughly conditioned to accept the degradation of human rights and large-scale destruction of our planetary home. Western education systems, media, and political propaganda instill ideological superiority and exceptionalism, enabling citizens of military empires like the United States to perceive the annihilation of human beings outside their borders as necessary expressions of progress, democracy, and defense. This worldview legitimizes the empire’s acceleration of warfare, crimes against humanity, and the degradation of international relations and human rights, while allowing Western(ized) subjects to maintain a moral high ground. Subjected to dehumanizing propaganda, these imperial citizens become complicit in crimes against humanity. But complicity is spectrum, from those who are reluctant yet systematically coerced participants in a criminal economy, to those who are deliberate propagators of dehumanizing ideologies and acts of domestic and international aggression against those deemed threatening to US homogeneity or US supremacy. As a result of the empire’s systematic instillment of ignorance, poverty, illness, despair, and compliance in its own citizens, a subset of the American public understand their position vis-à-vis the rest of the world as potential victims of imagined or projected future acts of aggression, rather than as participant-victims of their own government’s criminal and dehumanizing agenda. Therefore, when the Commission on the National Defense Industrial Strategy urges a “bipartisan call to arms,” and increases Pentagon funding from $5 trillion to $9.3 trillion to support the new National Defense Industrial Strategy, as it did in July 2024, few raise an eyebrow and fewer still protest. ↩
20. Nicholas Brady wrote this in a public Facebook post on August 18, 2020. Link here. ↩
21. This quote is from Munira Khayat’s research talk “A Landscape of War: Lessons on Resistance and Survival from South Lebanon,” presented on December 3, 2024 at Stanford University’s Center for the Humanities. Khayat is a visiting associate professor of anthropology at NYU, a clinical associate professor of anthropology at NYU Abu Dhabi, and the author of the academic monograph A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. ↩
22. The US military has a tradition of naming its helicopters after Native American tribes and leaders including Apache, Black Hawk, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Lakota, all of whom it massacred and continues to subjugate. ↩
23. A single, modern nuke carries the power of 100,000 (or more) tons of TNT and could kill more than half a million people if detonated in a densely populated area. The Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power, nicknamed “Father of All Bombs” (FOAB) was developed for the Russian military. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, Mother of All Bombs) is a large-yield bomb, developed for the United States military. The AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapons System (LaWS) is capable of unleashing 30,000 watts of laser power. The F-22 Raptor fighter jet carries an assortment of bombs and laser-guided missiles. The Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is a low-cost, semiactive laser guidance system. The MK-84 is a 2,000-pound general-purpose bomb. The US transferred more than 50,000 tons of weapons to Israel including 14,000 MK-84 bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs. These weapons, along with thousands of others, demarcate the reality of life on Earth. Weapons of war serve their purpose, whether they are detonated or not, by upholding the specter of death via instant annihilation. They empower nation states and their paramilitaries to actualize their aims through brute force, including the massacre of entire populations. The proliferation of weapons threatens the future of our species and the integrity of life, setting a deathtrap we must exit. ↩
24. In the epoch of bloodshed, all of us are either covered in the blood of the innocent or the blood of our open wounds. Or both. The point is not that we are equally culpable, but that we are equally susceptible to shedding blood. ↩
25. This is Sylvia Wynter’s formulation, from her essay, “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto.” In my view, the process of unmaking and remaking the world consists of three states of conscious embodiment: transpersonal attunement, species double consciousness, and autonomous action. ↩
26. A note on suffering. There are multiple forms of suffering. There is suffering that is natural to the human condition—for example, the infant’s painful bowel movement, the grief of losing a loved one to old age. And then there is gratuitous suffering; suffering that would not exist if it did not benefit an external party who is its catalyst, as in the case of engineered poverty, famines, and droughts, modern day slavery, modern warfare, weaponized rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. By suffering, I mean unnecessary but externally mandated suffering. ↩
27. Édouard Glissant. Treatise on the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021. ↩
28. I am haunted by the image of an Amazonian panther’s paws burned down to the flesh. This critically endangered animal ran for its life through smoldering forest fires. Ninety percent of the fires in the Amazon rainforest are intentionally set by people to clear land for cows to graze on in an attempt to satiate a bottomless hunger for slaughtering and eating this highly conscious, social, and empathic animal that is known, much like humans, to mourn its loved ones. The combination of logging and burning annihilates the ecological habitat of countless plants, animals, and Indigenous people whose survival depends on their home not being razed. ↩
29. When scientists account for all the mammals on planet Earth by biomass, it turns out that only 4% are wild mammals, 2% live on land, the other 2% are marine mammals. Humans comprise a whopping 34% of all mammals. The remaining 64% are “livestock,” animals like cows, pigs, and sheep who are bred—often in captivity—for the sole purpose of being slaughtered and eaten by humans. To create space for captive “livestock,” precious ecosystems are destroyed. How can a single species be so insatiable? How have we become so numb to the systematic destruction of our only planetary home? This discrepancy of biomass between humans, wild mammals, and captive mammals is an anthropogenic event of planetary proportion. The incessant slaughter of nonhuman mammals is also kin-shed. Blood and suffering spill over species distinction. Like the slaughter of animals, the incessant massacre of humans is normalized as a game of political, economic, and libidinal sport. Every act of violence is interconnected. Blood and death are the common denominator of our kinds. Life is incredibly fragile. All flesh is subject to atomization. According to various human cosmologies, an intangible dimension of being, called “the spirit,” transitions onward, whereas the body disintegrates in the mouths of millions. From this atomized form, our flesh continues the molecular metamorphosis of planetary life. Our bodies return to the elemental state of nature as soils, mosses, and flowers who feed the insects who feed the birds and reptiles who feed the mammals, and so on along the continuum of life-death-reformulation. The experience of embodied singularity is temporary, whereas life is eternal, inherently free and unencumbered by form. ↩
30. According to a United Nations report, eight newborns and 74 children died of hypothermia in the besieged Gaza strip between December 9, 2024 and January 9, 2025. ↩
31. These words are taken from a photograph of a person wearing a kuffiyah, holding a poster that reads: “I will not quietly nor politely sit and make house within the depravity of this killing machine.” ↩
32. These new connections can be internal to our own minds, such as emerging thought patterns and belief systems, or they can be externally reflected in our relationships with one another. In most cases, one begets the other. Relationships are at the core of the human fabric because they have the power to elevate our awareness and diminish fear of the unknown. If dehumanization thrives on disconnection and separation, then twenty-first century technologies provide us countless modes to connect with people across vast distances, to transmit our voices across borders and thousands of miles of ocean, to befriend and support people surviving in the harshest conditions. One of the simplest ways to resist the illusion of separation is to talk to people and form new relationships. To ask: How did you sleep? Was it cold? Did you eat today? Are your children okay? How can I support you? While I cannot single-handedly stop the war machine, I can befriend and support many who are surviving in its crosshairs. ↩
33. A note on empathy. Empathy has and continues to be a catalyst for social change. Empathy, or the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another person or being, has deep evolutionary roots and is not unique to humans. From a neuroscientific perspective, several areas of the human brain, including the anterior insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, are activated when individuals perceive or imagine the emotions and pain of others, suggesting that empathy involves both cognitive and affective processes. Empathy is related to the mirror neuron system: cells that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe the same action being performed by another. These neurons help individuals “mirror” the emotional and physical states of others. Research on neuroplasticity reveals that empathy is not a static trait and can be developed and enhanced throughout life. With this in mind, let us sow upon the blood-drenched earth the seeds of empathy. ↩
34. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 98. ↩
Umniya Najaer is an interdisciplinary poet, essayist and Black Studies scholar completing her PhD at Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature program. Sudanese by way of Germany and Turtle Island, Umniya’s writing is invested in activating the human ability to feel what each other feels. Her work is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a humanitarian commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization, brutality and deathmaking. Umniya believes that peace is possible and that we are alive at a critical juncture in our species’ trajectory. We are tasked now with de-escalation, demilitarization, disarmament and with crafting an alternate world system.
Umniya’s recent publications include “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children,” and “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Her poetry chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press as part of the First Generation African Poets series. Her work has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Sacatar Institute, Stanford VPGE’s Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship, the African American History Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Advisory Council Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation in Africa Fellowship, among others. Umniya will be serving as the Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder with the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) starting in the Fall of 2025.
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